Library of Judeo-Arabic Literature

An early autograph draft of “The Guide of the Perplexed,” by Moses Maimonides, dated to ca. 1185-1190 AD

It’s shocking and frustrating still, to put it mildly, to be excluded from the project that I conceived and founded.

But, apart from the continuing sharp pain of that entirely unjustifiable exclusion, which means that I won’t be and cannot be involved, I’m happy at the announcement from Brigham Young University’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI) of a new Library of Judeo-Arabic Literature:

I had always wanted to take METI in that direction (without, by any means, abandoning its strong commitment to Islamic and Eastern Christian materials).

And I’m especially happy at the news of a forthcoming dual-language edition of The Guide of the Perplexed, by Moses Maimonides. I have a particular interest in that famous text, which I’ve taught on several occasions, and METI’s publishing such an edition — with Shlomo Pines’s famous Chicago translation accompanied by an Arabic-script text of the original — was a long-standing dream of mine.